I was two doors from the end of the building when I heard an “Ooomph!” followed by the sound of Viv hitting the ground. She dropped the gun and it went off with every bit of the volume a huge gun is supposed to make.
I screamed and ducked, sure I’d been hit. Viv raised herself to her knees, looking more chagrined than hurt. “Sorry about that.”
I ran back and helped her up, Stump went silent for a couple of seconds, and then started back in even louder than before. Viv grabbed the gun and I helped her hobble to the car, all thoughts of solving any mystery lost in the urgent need to get the heck out of there.
I heard one of those metal doors slam behind us but I didn’t look back to see who was following us. I shoved Viv into the passenger seat, ran around to dive onto the bucket and shoved the key at the ignition. The bucket rocked wildly under me, but I didn’t let that slow me down. I jabbed at the ignition and finally got the key in when the guy rounded the building and stood, wide-legged, in front of us.
Viv and I both screamed. She raised the gun with trembling hands. It spun around in her hand and for a second aimed right at me.
“Him! Shoot him!” I said, not caring if he was really the bad guy or not, just not wanting her to shoot me by accident.
She grabbed the gun with both hands and tried to steady it; she looked like a female Don Knotts and the nose of the gun kept diving toward the floorboard.
“Here,” I said, reaching for the gun. “Let me –”
My door flew open, and something very, very hard slammed into my head
Chapter Fifteen
I saw stars. I wanted to faint, I really did, because then the pain would go away. Unfortunately, all I did was slump off the bucket. Strong hands grabbed at my shirt and dragged me onto the ground outside the car.
I tried to stand up, but the thing knocked me upside the head again, and I slid down to rest on the concrete. I could hear Stump barking furiously and Viv stuttering something between indignation and terror. Then I was being dragged by one arm around to the front of the car.
“Pull it around to the back,” a voice said. It was Sylvia, I realized. Sylvia, with a voice like steel, giving orders to some unseen person who did as they were told.
I got my feet under me enough to crab walk instead of being completely dragged. Ahead of me Viv had her hands on the back of her head, her own gun shoved into her back by the paunchy guy. He led her to the back door, which stood open now, and pushed her inside. Sylvia and I followed.
Sylvia shoved me hard enough to knock me down, then went back to the doorway. “Shut that thing up,” she barked. “It’ll wake up the whole town.”
Whoever was in the car was as powerless against Stump’s fury as I was, I noted with a totally-inappropriate-for-the-mess-I-was-in sense of smugness. Finally, he came in carrying Stump in her box.
Rey. Rey the jerk, Rey the scumbag, Rey the murderer.
“Give me my dog,” I said from my position on the floor.
He dropped the box and Stump landed with a yelp of pain. “Shut her up,” he said.
“Hey!” Viv shouted. Rey shoved her into the same chair she’d sat in the other day when we “interviewed” Sylvia.
I looked up at the paunchy guy. “I know you’re the one who broke into my house.”
“Congratulations, Sherlock,” Rey said. He squatted in front of me, his face nonchalant. “What are you going to do about it?”
“We’re going to alert the authorities and they’re going to put him in jail,” Viv said.
Rey and the guy laughed. Sylvia didn’t seem to see the humor in it any more than I did.
“You two quit kidding around and get this taken care of. I told you it wasn’t a good idea to send him, mijo.”
Rey shrugged. “What difference does it make now? Thomas gave her a warning, she didn’t heed the warning, so now we’ll go back to the original plan.” He gave me a cold smile that made my blood chill. I didn’t want to know what the original plan was.
I remembered Thomas now, one of the many cousins who lived in Oklahoma City who came to visit occasionally. He might have been at Tony’s and my wedding, I didn’t remember. He was a few years younger than Tony and Rey, the little shadow who idolized Rey and did everything Rey told him to do. Even now he was looking to Rey for his next move.
Sylvia, on the other hand, looked completely POed. “This is completely out of hand, Rey. Things weren’t supposed to go this way. If you had listened to me from the beginning this would never have happened. I told you that girl was bad news, and now look at me. About to have two more murders on my head.”
“Don’t, Mama.” Rey rose and hugged his mother. “Don’t do this to yourself. Think about your blood pressure. I’ll take care of it this time.”
“This time?” I blurted. I looked at Sylvia, shocked. “You killed Lucinda?”
“It’s none of your business!” Sylvia lunged toward me, her hand raised to slap me. I scooted back as quick as I could. “This was a family matter. If you’d kept your fat ass out of it everything would have worked out fine. You had to barge in and mess up everything.”
“I was just trying to help Tony. He doesn’t deserve to go to prison for something he didn’t do.”
“You idiot. He wouldn’t have gone to prison. Don’t you know anything? Tony is squeaky clean. His record is spotless and the evidence against him is completely circumstantial. He has a great lawyer. He would have gotten off.” She laughed, a cold laugh that chilled my blood. “St. Anthony the Perfect would never have served a day of prison time.”
I shook my head. “You mean you didn’t try to frame him?”
“We didn’t do anything except divert suspicion away from Rey. Tony would have had his day in court, he would have been acquitted, and everything would have gone back to normal.”
The fog was beginning to clear somewhat. “So, you killed Lucinda and framed Tony, and left just enough evidence for him to be charged but not convicted.” I hugged Stump to me. “That’s a risky game, Sylvia. There are a million things that could have gone wrong with that.”
“Yeah, like a nosy fat loser sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong.” Rey kicked my thigh and Stump growled.
“That’s enough!” Viv said sharply. “The next person who calls her fat is going to regret it. She happens to be big-boned.”
I looked at Viv. “Thanks, but right now we have bigger issues to deal with. We can tackle fat discrimination another day.”
“There’s not going to be another day for you,” Rey said cheerfully. He looked at Thomas. “What do you think? Cut them? Or take them out and shoot them?”
“You can’t make it look like a murder, mijo,” Sylvia said. “It has to be an accident.” She pursed her lips and studied us for a second. Then she reached for the door going into the shop, turning to Thomas. “You keep an eye on them. Keep them quiet, whatever you have to do. But don’t shoot them.”
She went into the hallway and Rey followed, closing the door behind them.
The fact that he had strict orders not to shoot us should have made me feel somewhat secure. But it didn’t. It was, after all, a very big gun and although he didn’t look like he wanted to shoot us, he looked like he could panic at the first hint of trouble and apologize for it later.
I chewed my lip and looked at Viv. Maybe she had an idea of how to get us out of this. But there weren’t any light bulbs going off over her head. In the movies, this was always where the bad guy started monologuing, explaining how the crime had happened. I had a lot of questions, but mostly they were about me and how I could stay alive. Lucinda was pretty much knocked off the top of my priority list at the moment. But since I didn’t know how to manage that, I settled for the next question on my list.
“What does Ricky Barlow have to do with all this?” I asked quietly.
“Shut up,” Thomas said.
“I’m sorry, I’m just curious. I know he’s connected because I followed you from his house. But I don’t know how.
What did he do?”
Thomas ignored me.
“He seems pretty clean. I mean, he used to party a lot when we were younger, but I can’t figure out what he has to do with all this.”
Silence.
“Did Lucinda know him?”
“You need to shut up. I can’t shoot you, but I can knock the crap out of you.” He raised an eyebrow. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
My stomach did a somersault. “Don’t get ugly,” I said. “I’m just curious. This doesn’t add up. He’s not connected in any way except he’s a friend of Rey’s…” I stopped and chewed my lip. “Is he Rey’s alibi?”
It was a shot in the dark, but I could see on Thomas’s face that it was on target.
“But how is that even possible? He was here, and Rey’s alibi is in Oklahoma City. That makes no sense.”
“Maybe he went to Oklahoma City and posed as someone else to be Rey’s alibi,” Viv said.
Thomas rolled his eyes. “How stupid is that? He would have had to know in advance that Rey was going to be here and going to need an alibi for that to work, and nobody knew Rey was going to be here. Sylvia didn’t even know until Rey called her from the church.”
Viv and I looked at each other. So we were the stupid ones, huh?
“So, Rey went to the church to talk to Lucinda? But then things went south? And he had to call in his mommy for help?”
Thomas glared. Looked kind of pouty to me. Like he’d just lost the Monopoly game.
“And then words were said,” Viv said.
“Lucinda probably insulted Sylvia’s cooking.” I looked at Viv and nodded.
“So Sylvia killed her,” she said.
“Rey was right. You are a smart-mouthed loser. I should have done what he suggested to you that night, instead of holding back like Sylvia wanted.” He gave me an up-and-down lecherous look that made it perfectly clear what Rey had suggested he do to me.
I should have been scared. Actually, I was scared, but the fear was making me sick and if I kept smarting off and concentrating on keeping one up on Thomas, I could keep my mind off the fact that I was probably about to die. If I thought about that I’d start to cry and the last thing I wanted was to have Rey come back in and see me crying.
“You always do what you’re told, don’t you, little Tommy boy? Always Rey’s little shadow, following whatever orders Rey gives you.”
“Shut up.”
“See, Viv, we’re wasting our breath with this guy. He doesn’t know what happened that night. He only knows what Rey tells him to do, and he’s so busy keeping his head up Rey’s butt he can’t even see that they’re using him.”
Thomas stood and leveled the gun at me. “You’d better keep in mind that you want me to follow orders right now.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing would come out. At last my big mouth was showing some intelligence.
I looked up at Viv. Her face drooped like an old hound dog’s. “You know, everybody was right. We’re no good at this detective thing. We never did figure it out. And now we’re going to die.”
“No, we’re not. They wouldn’t kill us.”
“Sure they would. They killed Lucinda. They framed Tony to take the fall for it. Why wouldn’t they kill us, too?”
Viv was scaring me even more than Thomas and the gun were. “Lucinda was an accident. And you heard Sylvia, they never intended for Tony to go to jail. They just used him to take the heat off Rey.”
Viv turned to Thomas, her hands shaky and her voice pleading. “If it was an accident, then it’s not too late for this all to be straightened out. Maybe Rey or Sylvia would do a little bit of jail time, but they’d get off light. Not like the prison time he’s going to get for murdering her and us. Was it an accident? Was it?”
Thomas swallowed and lowered the gun. He shook his head. “I don’t really know. All I know is Lucinda and Rey had a fight, then Sylvia said she had to step in and take care of things.”
“But why did Lucinda call Tony that night?” I asked. “Did Rey break that floor buffer just to get him up there?”
“You’re totally over-thinking it, Salem. Lucinda never called anybody, the buffer was never broken.” Rey came into the room holding two glasses. Ricky Barlow followed him, looking sick and terrified. You’d think from the look on his face he was the one about to be murdered.
“Why?” Viv asked at the same time I said, “What are you doing here?”
Sylvia came in behind them, carrying a length of fabric and looking grim.
“Rey went to see her because he wanted to talk to Lucinda. Just talk. About the baby and about what they were going to do. But Lucinda never would listen.” She said something in Spanish that didn’t sound like a compliment. “She never knew how to keep her mouth shut. She’s the one who’s the troublemaker and always has been. I warned Rey about her, but he all he saw were those big innocent eyes and that body she flashed around.”
She stepped behind me and pulled my arms behind my back. “Don’t you judge me, Salem. You have no idea how hard it is to raise a family, and you never will. You don’t know what a mother would do for her son.”
As she talked she wrapped the fabric around my wrists, tying them tight enough I couldn’t get out.
“Would she kill for him?” I asked.
“If she had to!” She tugged the fabric and pulled my shoulders painfully. “Don’t you dare judge me! If it meant saving her son from a prison sentence he didn’t deserve, then yes, she would. If she was any kind of mother at all, she sure would.” Sylvia straightened and pushed her hair out of her face. “You weren’t there, Salem. You have no idea what happened or what you would have done if you’d been there. All Rey wanted to do was talk to her, and she goaded him and teased him with threats of going to Tony. No one in their right mind would be able to withstand that kind of torture from the woman he loved, from the woman carrying his child. Of course he snapped.”
“He snapped?” Viv asked. “How did he snap?”
“None of your business,” Sylvia said.
“I did what I should have done a long time ago,” Rey said. “I shut her up. I gave her a taste of what happens when you don’t treat people right. She never treated me right. She used me and then threw me away.”
“Stephanie said you refused to marry Lucinda.”
“That’s a lie!” Sylvia shoved Viv until she was perched on the edge of the chair, then snatched at her arms and began to wind the fabric tight around her wrists, too. “That lying little tramp had better keep her mouth shut if she knows what’s good for her. She doesn’t know the first thing about anything. All she knows is what Lucinda told her and you can’t believe one single word of that. Rey wanted to marry her, tried to marry her, but all he did was insist she take a test to make sure the baby was really his. He was going to marry her even if it wasn’t his. He just wanted to know the truth so they could start out the marriage in truth, in honesty.”
I snuck a look at Rey. Somehow I didn’t think the paternity test was completely his idea.
“So you hit her?” I asked quietly.
He stared at me. He didn’t have to say the word yes. He didn’t have to say that he’d do it again in a heartbeat, that he wasn’t a bit sorry. His eyes said it all.
“But it didn’t kill her. You hurt her enough for it to be serious, maybe even knocked her unconscious. You panicked, didn’t know what to do. So you did what you always do. You called your mommy.”
I lifted my chin and waited for Rey to hit me again. So I was a little startled when the knock to my head came from Sylvia, straight into my right temple.
This time I almost did pass out. I kept talking, because I thought if I didn’t, I would pass out. Irrationally, I thought that if I could just stay conscious, I could stay alive. “Sylvia showed up and knew you were about to go to prison for beating up a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Maybe you even killed the baby. That’s at least a manslaughter charge right there.”
“
A manslaughter charge he did not deserve!” Sylvia barked. She jerked the fabric at Viv’s wrists.
“Ow, you heifer!” Viv shouted. She pulled forward. “The tunnels! Under the church! Remember, Salem? We saw them the other day when we were up in the tower. They snuck through the tunnels.” Viv looked very proud of herself. “That’s how they got in and nobody saw them.”
“But how did you get into the tunnels?” I asked. Then I remembered the last time Viv and I had been to the laundromat to speak to Sylvia. That seemed like months ago, but it was just a couple of days. Sylvia had pointed out the door that led to the basement. There was probably access to the tunnels in her basement. Viv had said they went all over downtown.
Ricky stood in the corner, looking like he wanted to blend into the paint, and Rey walked by and hissed something at him. He looked at Viv and me and nodded grimly.
Sylvia ignored my question and answered one no one had asked. “He was goaded into it, Lucinda egged him on.” She groaned as she straightened and stood. “She knew just which buttons to push to get him to lose his temper, and then she went running to the police when he did. She liked playing with him like that, liked the power she had over him. She played with him like a cat with a mouse. She was the one who deserved prison, not my son. Not my son who was working so hard to turn his life around, who wanted nothing more than to raise his child and live in peace. Not my son who’d just gotten the call to serve God, who’d just developed a passion for helping people.”
I was real careful not to let my face show what I thought about that statement. Rey serving God. Rey helping people. Puh-leeze. I believed, of course, that people could change. I had to believe it, since I’d been trying so hard to be one of those people. But looking at Rey’s eyes right then, I didn’t think he was one of those people.
I felt sorry for Sylvia. She was right; I had no idea what it was like, raising a son. A son who disappointed you, broke your heart, manipulated you repeatedly to clean up his messes and fix what he’d broken. I had no idea. Shoot, I’d probably do the same for Stump and she was my dog, not my flesh and blood. I still didn’t want Sylvia to kill me, but I did feel sorry for her.
The Middle Finger of Fate (A Trailer Park Princess Cozy Mystery Book 1) Page 28